Against a Perpetuating Fiction: Disentangling Art from Hyperreality

May not one succeed in systemizing confusion and so assist the total discrediting of the world of reality?

—Salvador Dali

What is wanted of such a vantage point is that it do justice to the twin aspects of art: as object and as function, as artifice and as living form of consciousness, as the overcoming or supplementing of reality and as the making explicit of forms encountering reality, as autonomous individual creation and as dependent historical phenomenon.

—Susan Sontag, "On Style," in Against Interpretation

The social condition labeled "postmodernism" threatens human creation and significance by denying the existence of reality. One has difficulty resisting postmodernism because doing so would presume that postmodern theory is coherent and unified; it is also erroneous to believe it is a fashionable term applied by some to seem intellectual. There is no such thing as a "postmodern theory," only postmodern theories and theorists. Even the philosophers that identified themselves with postmodernism had differing definitions and changed their attitudes on the subject throughout their lives. Postmodernism is as pervasive and chronic as a pandemic.

But there is no consequence of postmodernism more appalling than the social relationship French philosopher Jean Baudrillard identified as "hyperreality." "Hyperreality" is a term used to describe the way the world is absorbed by an individual's preference for illusory objects over authentic ones. This is done through the modification of an object or cultural icon to make it more appealing than its actual form. It is specifically linked to postmodernism since it is a product of deconstructionists' attempts to discover "the truth behind truth." For them, reality is defined as the sensory perception of objects, and truth as the faith in the immutability of those objects. Hyperreality tears these affirmations apart by insisting that the qualities that make an object unique (haecceitas) are not related to the essence of that object (quidditas). In other words, things are not at all what they seem. Defending oneself against hyperreality could result in a suspicion of all fictitious creations, including art. But art has its own distinct status in the world and offers alternatives to resist and combat hyperreality. Whereas hyperreality limits a person's engagement to reality, art strengthens that unity. By examining the aesthetic and social origins of hyperreality, and the development and role of art, the division between the two incompatible illusions can be recognized.

Postmodernism, the progenitor of hyperreality, is principally explained as a reaction to modernism, while avoiding the linguistic paradox of being "after modern." What, then, was modernism? Or, what did modernists believe that postmodernists reject? Modernist aesthetics were an attempt to rejuvenate art in a society that had lost meaning. It explored the effectiveness of language in establishing concepts, especially words with ambiguous definitions, like "nationalism" or "good." Artists focused often on existential situations, either by praising the human condition or struggling for its improvement in a maddening world. Most modernists are seen as having a sense of hope (or at least a very firm belief) that their ideas, whether celebratory or judgmental in content, could lead to a utopian future through a reevaluation of society's flaws.

But the system of postmodernism does not allow such criticism—because all criticism is inherently correct. The concept of disagreement, therefore, does not exist. The fundamental postmodernist is a skeptic investigating the validity of messages purporting to be truth. It is similar to the modernist's efforts to disambiguate words; however, the postmodernist does not offer comfort: "the postmodern mind seems to condemn everything, propose nothing. Demolition is the only job the postmodern mind seems to be good at. Destruction is the only construction it recognizes."¹ The postmodernist can be seen as a person dealing with two mounds of peanuts. On one side are the shells not yet cracked, which one can discern to be a peanut and yet not, each shell only suggesting what it contains; on the other side are the discarded shells whose insides have been acknowledged and devoured. The two mounds split the truth of the peanuts only into "about to be deconstructed" and "already deconstructed." But the postmodernist...